“What surrounds a brand shapes how it speaks”: designer Laura Beulens on the delicate art of building a visual identity

Based in Ghent, Belgium, graphic designer Laura Beulens balances her time between crafting beautiful brand identities and sharing her knowledge of the field, teaching at Luca School of Arts – “a rhythm of doing and reflecting that keeps my work both grounded and sharp”, she tells us. With breaks between her freelance work, she’s found that this schedule has given her space to slow down in between client briefs and reflect on her unfolding practice, rather than “sprint from project to project”.

As a result, Laura carefully chooses what freelance work she wants to focus on, finding that, over time, the best visual identities she’s created always sit with those brands and people whose values she aligns closest with – “projects that carry a clear inner compass”, she shares. As many of us have discovered the hard way, creativity can’t be forced – and Laura has learnt she has to feel a “yes” somewhere in her gut at the outset of the project. Less a luxury and more of a non-negotiable, this sense of trust in a brand and what it stands for is simply the only way to make “the kind of design I want to make”, she says.

This sense of simplicity and intuition touches areas of the designer’s life outside of work, including the way that she engages with brands and products herself: “I don’t buy much, but when I do, it’s something I’ve researched, waited for and looked forward to. That sense of joy and connection, that’s what I want people to feel when they engage with a brand I’ve helped build”, she says. A brief is always followed then, by the kind of deep dive she might do before working out what cooker or kettle to buy – a period of expansive research going down rabbit holes into the project’s subject matter, or as she describes in the first line of her web bio: “Some people get obsessed with true crime podcasts. Laura Beulens gets locked-in with your brand.”

As for her delicate and refined visual style that seamlessly integrates graphic systems into the spaces they inhabit, this might come from her background in interior design. Aware of every identity system’s context, the designer takes her research into thorough tests of a brand’s tone of voice through copy, layout and content, always with one thing in mind: “what surrounds a brand shapes how it speaks.”